Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  “My God, Richard! Are you all right?”

  “I’m freezing, I’m exhausted, my head is killing me. But yeah, I’m all right.”

  “Listen. I’ve been out of my mind here. They won’t tell me anything. I’ve been calling and calling and . . . all they keep saying is you’re not on the computer yet. It’s like you’re not even there, Richard!”

  He smiled. “Oh, I’m here. Believe me.”

  “Have they set your bail yet?”

  “Yes. Three hundred sixty-nine dollars. Can you manage it?”

  “Of course I can manage it. I’ll get down to the bank right now.”

  “Don’t hurry. I’m not getting out of here for a while. According to Johansson they keep you eight hours minimum from the time of arrest—or booking. I’m not sure which. What time’s it now?”

  “Almost seven.”

  “Jesus. Four more hours.”

  “Oh God, Richard. I’m so sorry!”

  “Hey, it’s not your fault. It was just bad luck, that’s all.”

  “If I hadn’t told you to turn. . . .”

  “I know. And if I didn’t have some squad car behind me. And if we hadn’t been drinking all night. And if I hadn’t come down here in the first place. Forget that. You can drive yourself crazy.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  “What?”

  “Coming down here.”

  “No. I regret being arrested.”

  “You swear?”

  “I swear. Not for a minute.”

  He could hear her thinking about that. And the truth was he really did have no regrets in her regard. After so many months of separation he’d been surprised to get the invitation in the first place. And even more surprised at how glad he was to see her.

  Before she left him there’d been nothing but fighting, for a long while. Probably, the marriage had made them both too . . . passionate for their own good about one another’s faults and neglected virtues. He didn’t know about her, but he now found himself less frenzied. A year apart had taken care of that. It made for easier sledding. If he missed the sheer intensity sometimes—and he did—he didn’t miss the drunken anguish that, all too often, went along with it.

  He felt softer now, more flexive.

  He hoped that in her own way so did she.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll try to get a couple hours sleep and set the clock for eight-thirty. By nine-thirty I’ll be at the bank and down there by ten with the money. Just in case you can get out early. I just wish they’d get you on the goddamn computer. You’ve been there four hours! How long does it take?”

  “I guess they figure they’ve got time.”

  The guard was tapping him on the shoulder, motioning him back inside.

  “Gotta go,” he said.

  “Richard? Is it horrible?”

  “Bearable. I’m trying to sleep as much as possible.”

  “Good. I miss you. I’m sorry. I’ll see you soon, all right?”

  “Okay.”

  He hung up. Wondering, strangely, if he’d ever actually see her again.

  Get a grip, he thought.

  Good God.

  Inside the holding cell the fat kid was still snoring, looking bigger and softer than ever, his breasts spread out across the sides of his flabby biceps. The con in prison orange was asleep directly across from him. But the crazy guy was wide awake.

  “Cell,” he said. “You’re in it now.”

  Right. That again.

  The eyes darted warily. The man closed them and lay back down. Seconds later he was snoring too. All three of them were snoring. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so disgusting. Like the toilet sitting there in the middle of the room was disgusting.

  The guy whose wife had turned him in was gone.

  Richard was glad for the empty bench.

  He lay down. The bench smelled of alcohol and aftershave. The scent of the guy who’d been lying there.

  As though part of him had bled right into it.

  It came without warning.

  One minute he was trying to get comfortable, trying to relax against the pounding in his skull—and suddenly he was asleep again.

  It was like entering a black empty room without doors or windows, a room that swayed and shifted like the surface of a pond under a breeze, as though he were riding that surface, a place where neither day nor night nor time of any recognizable sort even existed—or if it did exist, could possibly matter—just silent, constant, nearly unnoticed movement, some slow-moving drift that seemed to well up out of the vague internal shiftings of the earth like magma. He had a sense of indifference, not only his own indifference but something in the nature of things which absorbed without judging, without sense of right or wrong, strong or weak, clean or dirty or even yes or no. It was as though the world were a stewpot—on simmer. And he was a scrap of meat.

  Breaking down.

  The holding cell, he thought.

  Holding. Cell.

  The words sounded odd in his head.

  And then he was the fat kid—no, he was the fat of the fat kid and he was melting, scalding human gravy running all along the bench and over the floor, pooling at the wall, an obscene sticky mess running off over muscle and bone, a surprising lot of muscle for a kid so fat—but who was he to criticize. He was the juice. He was the problem.

  He woke. The door clanged shut.

  The fat kid—the real fat kid—was gone.

  The con in prison orange sat up on the bench across from him, waking, rubbing his eyes.

  Then staring at him.

  “You ever been in a holding cell before?” he said.

  Richard’s mouth felt dry. “Unh-unh.”

  “Shit. I’d ask him but he’s fucking bonkers.” He nodded toward the crazy guy, still sleeping.

  “Thing is, something ain’t right here.”

  “What?”

  “Asshole. If I knew that, I wouldn’t be talking to you, would I.”

  Richard decided not to comment.

  “Ought to be more of us, for one thing. Usually you get people parading in all night. Second thing, I never been in this particular cell before and I thought I seen every damn one of ’em in the whole damn county. Third thing is, where the fuck’s everybody got to?”

  Richard shook his head.

  “You make your phone call?”

  “Yeah. A while before. You were sleeping.”

  “I been sleeping like the fucking dead. You gettin’ bond?”

  “Bond?”

  “A bail-bondsman. You getting a bail-bondsman.”

  “My wife . . . my ex-wife. She’s—”

  He laughed. Surprisingly it was not an unpleasant laugh. “You got an ex-wife’ll make your bail? Very nice.”

  He smiled. “That’s if they can find me on the damn computer.”

  “Computer?”

  “As of around seven I wasn’t on it.”

  “Bullshit! You’re on the fucking computer the minute you step into this place. Before that. In the fucking car you’re on the computer. That’s bullshit!”

  “That’s . . . that’s what they told her.”

  “It’s a fuckup. It’s some fuckup then.”

  He shook his head again, ran his hand through his thinning sandy hair.

  “This fucking place . . . .”

  “Cell,” said the crazy guy. “You’re in it.”

  There was an edge to his voice this time, something sort of excited, and they looked at him. He was sleeping, talking in his sleep.

  “You’re in it,” he said. He was tossing on the bench, legs wobbling every which way like they were made of rubber.

  “Asshole,” said the con. He lay back down again.

  Richard’s head felt worse than ever—soft, eggshell-thin. He pressed it gently back against the wall.

  I swear to God, he thought, I’ll never drink again.

  Not wine at least.

  He closed his eyes for a moment.

  And
it was as though he could see through the eyelids, a thin pale red-veined film over everything, over the con on his bench and the crazy guy on the other, over the gleaming metal toilet in the center of the room and the door with the single small window behind it—as though he were the bloodshot walls of the cell itself. Watching. He could even see himself sitting there with his legs spread wide, shirt and trousers wrinkled, his head pressed to the damp wall.

  He presumed be was sleeping again, his access to sleep just that sudden.

  It shocked him, that access. Frightened him.

  Nobody should sleep like this, he thought.

  Nobody.

  What was it the con had said?

  I been sleeping like the fucking dead.

  What kind of sleep was this anyway?

  And what kind of dream where he could watch them, both the con and the crazy guy, start to struggle weakly—could see himself start to struggle—against the shifting tides that were the room—faces, bodies going soft, growing indistinct and somehow particulate, breaking down, blending into the room, part of the room, looking like something he’d once seen alive through a microscope, some amoebic protoplasmic bacterial something, even the toilet losing its precise form now, dark inside the gelatinous mass, its flowing nucleus.

  A shitter. The nucleus of a cell.

  He almost laughed.

  Instead he screamed soundlessly and tried to wake.

  The con was on his feet—or on his knees—his feet and calves sinking suddenly into the shimmering floor, absorbed instantly to the knee. For a moment the flesh of his face resolved into an expression of fear and astonishment, then slipped away as the con himself slipped away somewhere in front of what moments ago had been his bench.

  The crazy guy was already gone.

  An atomic swarm like thousands of tiny dots on an empty tv screen, drifting.

  He felt a helpless panic.

  He looked down. The silk shirt, the beltless pants, the socks. All sinking into him. His flesh blood and bone sliding gently back into the wall, into the bench, the bench sliding down into the quivering shifting floor. . . .

  He fought his assimilation for quite some time.

  The Paul Stuart shoes were the last to go—laces and all. He was actually glad to see them.

  Inside the holding cell, almost everyone was wearing Reeboks. Thousands of them.

  He guessed it didn’t hurt to be different.

  The Work

  “Funny place to meet,” he said. He sat across from her at the old formica table, sipping his coffee only rarely, waiting for her to get to it, wrapping an elastic band around his middle finger and forefinger and then releasing it, a nervous gesture, the only one he’d displayed so far, a tic. She could live with it.

  “You wouldn’t be thinking of trying to take me down, would you?”

  She laughed by way of answering him. “Where do most of your clients want to meet?”

  “A bar. A restaurant. Neutral territory. Not their kitchen usually, and never in the kitchen of some house out in the woods all alone in the middle of nowhere. That’s a new one on me. Aren’t you worried I might have something other than business in mind? You’re an attractive woman. You obviously realize that. And you don’t know me at all, do you.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not worried. Half an hour ago, before you arrived I was. I admit I was. Because you never know. But I’m a good judge of people. Comes with the territory. And I think you’re probably very professional about what you do. I thought that about five minutes after I first laid eyes on you.”

  “I am. That’s true.”

  “But to get back to your first question the fact is that with what I’m about to ask you to do, I’d be the one more likely to get taken down, as you say, than you. Hang on for just a second.”

  She got up and walked to the middle of the room to throw two split logs in the big potbellied stove. It was only September 12th but already nights in the Maine woods were chilly though the days were bright and clear. She closed the grate. The stove immediately began to roar, the draw creating a furious wind tunnel inside, a small inferno. She’d always liked the sound.

  She sat down. “That’s better.”

  For a moment she just looked at him and sipped her own black coffee, watching him over the rim. She thought that Carey was attractive too in his own strange way though she couldn’t call him handsome. His hair was thin and his face too rough for her tastes. She could picture him with a toolbelt around his waist, working with his hands somehow—instead of in the tailored English suit he was wearing now. Strong, efficient. And composed. Very composed. All he did was sit there and wait her out while she took his measure. No pressure to continue. No impatience. As though he trusted that she’d get there when she was good and ready.

  “Let me tell you something about myself, Mr. Carey,” she said.

  “Richard. And I don’t usually want to know too much about my clients. Sometimes it gets in the way.”

  She nodded. “I can understand that but in this case it’s important. Without knowing who I am I doubt you’d even take the job.”

  “Really?” He smiled.

  “Really. Trust me on this.”

  Now it was his turn to look. She waited for his permission.

  “All right,” he said. “Tell me.”

  “I’m a writer. A novelist. I do the occasional short story as well. I’ve published eight books in this country and nine in England. I’ve published in France, Italy, Japan—even in Russia believe it or not. I have what I suppose you’d call a cult following. Though my sales figures have always been small. If I sell forty thousand paperback copies of any given book I’m lucky. There are fans out there who seem to devour everything I do, even search for the out-of-print novels—and most of them are out of print—through mail-order catalogues and used bookshops. But I’ve never been able to break through with anything. Probably, I never will.”

  “Why’s that?”

  He was interested, she could tell by the look on his face. Which probably meant he was a reader. She supposed from a man like this you might expect the unexpected.

  “I’m cranky I suppose. I write what I like to write. The kinds of books I like to read. Mostly they’re short, a couple hundred pages. And Americans all seem to want doorstops these days, or at least that’s what publishers are foisting off on them. Plus it has to do with the kind of things I write. Suspense, horror. I tend to proceed from the dark side, to try to disturb you. Some of it can be pretty brutal. But look at it this way. Stephen King can be brutal. James Ellroy and Thomas Harris can be brutal. And they’ve all written bestsellers. They also happen to be honest writers. No. Mostly it’s the publishers. They check the computer to see what you sold last time and that’s the number they expect to run this time. I can’t seem to get them to print enough copies so that they can sell enough copies to get my work out there on any kind of ongoing basis.”

  “Change your style. Write them a big fat blockbuster.”

  She opened a fresh pack of Winstons.

  “I don’t have a big fat blockbuster in me, Richard. Nothing wrong with them if you have the stamina, if you can sustain it. Lonesome Dove certainly manages. But I rarely read them and I rarely like them when I do, and I’m damned if I’m going to write something just for the money or so some editor can be flavor of the month with the boys on publishers’ row. Anyhow, all that’s beside the point now.”

  She lit the cigarette and held out the pack. He took one and she lit that too.

  “Thank God,” she said. “A smoker.”

  Cigarette smoke rode the back of the woodsmoke from the stove and mingled with tonight’s earlier cooking smells. Steak. Baked potato and steamed squash.

  “More coffee?”

  “If it’s not too much trouble. The flight. Then the drive here.”

  “No trouble if you don’t mind microwave this time.”

  “That’s fine.”

  She got up and went to the sink and rinsed his
cup, filled it with lukewarm coffee and put it in the microwave. The timer buzzed away the seconds. She watched the moths fluttering at the window over the sink, dozens of them drawn to the light, wanting in. She turned away from them.

  “I’m not interested in getting rich,” she said. “I make enough to squeak by on and I’ve long since come to terms with that. The work’s the thing, Richard. I work hard and carefully at what I do and I think I do it fairly well. I’m no Dostoevski but I’m no hack either. You get themes in my books, you get people, issues—though I try hard not to hammer you over the head with them. You get some decent writing. What you don’t get I hope is simple, comfortable beach-reading. Tub-reading. Subway-reading. You don’t get Jackie Collins. It’s the work not getting out there—that it’s simply unavailable most of the time even if you wanted to read it, even if you’re looking for it—that’s what gets my goat. That’s what I always come back to.”